It wouldn’t be a movie pageant with out not less than one well timed, harrowing emigrant story, however simply once you would possibly suppose the stylistic prospects have been exhausted — from documentary, to vérité-style fiction and infrequently a touch of deadpan comedy (like Ben Sharrock’s great Limbo, 2020) — alongside comes Noaz Deshe’s audacious, delirious function Xoftex. Maybe too out-there in its ideas and execution for mainstream crossover, Deshe’s movie ought to decide up steam on the arthouse circuit, providing an unorthodox, usually indirect, however emotionally highly effective try to recreate onscreen the disorientation of the stateless thoughts.
The title, which appears like one thing Large Pharma would possibly produce, is definitely an immigrant compound in Greece, the place largely Muslim refugees are housed whereas they await the end result of their asylum claims. This, a brusque opening credit score tells us, can take as much as a yr, however the fact is that the method can go on a lot, for much longer. To move the time, a gaggle of males, led by Nasser (Abdulrahman Diab) and his older brother Yassin (Osama Hafiry), each fleeing the Syrian conflict, make films on Nasser’s telephone, appearing out tales from their direct expertise, anticipating the potential for pressured repatriation, even going as far as to make a humorous, surreal touch upon conflict reportage in a spoof interview with a bomb.
The camp is an unlimited white enclave of prefab bins extra befitting of an industrial property than a suburb, which is what it successfully is, and its inhabitants speak excitedly, even romantically, about being anyplace however there. One man goals of Paris, one other directs him to Poland. One other factors out the possibly harmful right-wing political feeling that’s rising in each these locations (“You suppose Europe means human rights,” he says, in probably the most reducing line in the complete film). Nasser’s brother simply appears to be joyful to tag alongside together with his brother, who has his sights set on Sweden. There, Nasser will pursue his goals of changing into a scientist, within the maybe naïve hope that he’ll be capable to invent one thing so extraordinary that may change the world for individuals like him perpetually.
For the primary hour or so, Deshe’s movie focuses on the psychological torture of staying put: dwelling in a twilight zone that involves resemble a dystopian sci-fi film (there are hints of Tarkovsky’s Stalker). It additionally briefly digresses into the brutal factuality of leaving, introducing us to the individuals smuggler who, for a payment, will stow escapees on trains sure for the Balkans, providing them tips about methods to keep away from being maimed by flying stones and repel the attentions of border-control sniffer canines.
Nasser decides to remain, believing within the system, however when his software is turned down (or has it simply been ignored once more?), the futility of his nowhere life begins to eat away at him. Time is actually not a measurable commodity on this world. “How lengthy have you ever been right here?” he asks the opposite members of the drama group. Nobody can keep in mind, which evokes him to make their subsequent manufacturing: a zombie flick.
These metatextual layers — fictions inside fictions — are deliberate and to not be underestimated, since, in his on-line science courses, Nasser hears lots about one thing referred to as “the Casimir impact”, an unexplained power — “It shouldn’t exist, however it does” — that exists in a vacuum between two dealing with mirrors.
Mirrors are a significant metaphor in Deshe’s movie (one among Nasser’s longer gestating initiatives is an summary paintings made from damaged mirror shards, and he’s fascinated when one among his neighbors decorates his prefab dwelling with a disco mirror ball). But there’s a larger sense that Nasser is trapped by the huge, Orphée-style liquid mirror that’s the ocean; having made a dangerous sea-crossing in an inflatable boat, his goals (and nightmares) all have a surreal, submerged high quality, suggesting that half (or all?) of him by no means made it to Greece within the first place.
That’s fairly sufficient to be happening with, however Xoftex takes a quantum leap into mannered strangeness with a lyrical however irritating 20-minute coda that remembers the Greek “bizarre wave”. On that foundation, it’s a disgrace that Deshe’s movie isn’t only a little extra user-friendly, however to play satan’s advocate, his use of teasing, unapologetically inscrutable esoterica — which is current all by way of the movie, notably in a subplot involving “sleepers” who by no means appear to get up from their traumatic journeys — provides the movie its hypnotic energy.
Not everybody will succumb to it, however for people who do, Xoftex is an immersive fever dream concerning the actuality of pressured statelessness: an everlasting, numbing now the place the dazzling prospects of tomorrow dangle, unobtainable, in plain view. Fittingly, for the setting, very very like the punishments of Greek mythology.
